mandrillectomy

(space shuttle, via Eric Jones on facebook)

Against Tradition.

"Becoming a mother made me a goth." --Joyelle McSweeney

The spider's leg that's Sleipnir Fossa.

solastalgia kangling

(dust devil on mars, via @mikeseibert)

first ruin tourism then virtual ruin tourism. what next, ruined ideology tourism?

vimana glooscap

(via thesun dot co dot uk)

"Terror and plagues are not an answer." --C S Lewis

Bowie as Tesla.

glooscap at aphelion

(Tanguy, Imaginary Numbers, via the-love-of-richard-nixon on tumblr)

Be see it upside down.

snqwiu

(via You Need Capybaras on twitter)

Imagining Autisms: "In fact, there is something peculiarly postmodern about autism itself..."

too Stasi biro
murmur dumb
mud rum rumor
ibis at soot

V. Revisited (4)

Reading at the same time as V. two spy-ish autobiographies of the Thirties, Eastern Approaches & The Infernal Grove, i am struck at the uncanny resemblance. I feel at home in this topsy-turvy, midcentury, European conspiroclasm: as absurd as anything P. could devise, & as lethal.

In later books P. seems to have mostly dropped the tension between the potential interpretations of his stories as actual conspiracies & as sheer paranoia. This quality makes me think also of that tension between supernaturalist & psychological explanations in ghost stories around the turn of the last century--The Turn of the Screw but not only James--which creates a special space within the genre all its own.

Near the end of the book i sort of realized that "V." wasn't an initial of a name or a word but the Roman numeral 'five': & that the character seeking a single entity whose name begins with that letter, is simply wrong. On p. 167:

"An ivory comb, five toothed: whose shape was that of five crucified, all sharing at least one common arm. None of them was a religious figure: they were soldiers of the British Army. She had found the comb in one of the Cairo bazaars. It had apparently been hand-carved by a Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an artisan among the Mahdists, in commemoration of the crucifixions of '83, in the country east of invested Khartoum..."

On p. 443: " 'Here. In case you think tomorrow it was a dream.' Her hair fell loose. She handed him an ivory comb. Five crucified Limeys--five Kilroys--stared briefly at Valletta's sky before he pocketed it. 'Don't lose it in a poker game. I've had it a long time.' "

A souvenir of torture becomes a token of love, connecting the divided stories...the artifact that would prove the existence of V., & which eludes Stencil at last--at arm's length.

--This just after P. has explained the notorious "Kilroy" cartoon graffito by means of an electronic diagram for a band-pass filter. (Whereas i believe he noticed the resemblance himself, & so reverses the pareidolia.)

One can also count the four ['happy master'--ha!] Faustos (the last being "an interregnum") & we actually get to meet still another one.

And i think of P.'s two worlds, the modern one without tragedy or heroism, & the secret twentieth century, of the Great Game & profound obsessions; the character who wishes he did not have to choose, & the character who constantly makes the crazed meaningless gesture of choosing... This is like an inverted Bhagavad Gita that, instead of justifying war with fatalism, undermines it with existentialism.

V. Revisited (3)

Precise description as a kind of texture; an arabesque. A statement about the world: that the number of plots is infinite. (The Man Who Was Thursday.)

Just when you think you're onto one story, he throws you another--perpendicular to the other--& which may or may not intersect any of the previous.

"...there would come to him hints of the perfume those people distill from the wings of black moths."

Like the plots of TV shows that become so convoluted (i remember "Dark Shadows" in particular) they're impossible to follow...

Lives lived at the intersection of Futility & Obsesion.